Monday, July 16, 2012

Ichiro Suzuki is a 38-year-old impending free agent having the worst season of his brilliant career, hitting .258 with a .286 on-base percentage and .345 slugging percentage, but Mariners general manager Jack Zduriencik made it very clear that he has no plans to trade the outfielder and in fact expects to re-sign him for next season.

“He’s going to be a Mariner,” Zduriencik told Jon Morosi of FOXSports.com. “We intend to keep him. I’m telling you, he’s going to be a Mariner. He’s a big part of this team. He’s a franchise player here, and we have phenomenal respect for him.”

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The Mariners could and probably should keep him around another few years if he's cheap, but if he expects more than about 3/18 they're better off letting him walk. (Insert "but Ichiro doesn't walk!" witticism of your choice here.)

And yeah, like #1 I can't believe that contract is up already. I thought it was just last month David Samson was calling it the end of the world as we know it (I think those were his exact words). The Mariners got their money's worth out of it, I think.

Ray: To believe that you'd have to also believe they have a spectacularly bad pitching staff.

There's this thing called "talent". They don't have it. At least not on the major league team; the Mariners seem to have the same aptitude for failing to develop hitting talent that the Orioles have long had for pitching talent.

Kyle Seager (the 3rd baseman) is hitting .167/.275/.264 at home and .313/.343/.548 on the road. So there must be at least some talent there, I would think. I mean, I doubt he's as good as the road numbers (which aren't spectacular, but are serviceable), but he can't be as bad as those home numbers are. He wouldn't be the starter if he was.

It seems to me like if you're playing in a severe pitchers' park then above all you want patient hitters, since the park makes no difference in walk rates. But the Mariners DO have patient hitters--Smoak, Ackley, Brendan Ryan and Casper Wells all have excellent walk rates, and Michael Saunders and the aforementioned Kyle Seager knows how to take a walk too. But the other hitters in their lineup (Ichiro!, Montero, Olivo or whoever's playing catcher today) are so completely useless that there's no one to drive those runners in, not even with singles.

There's this thing called "talent". They don't have it. At least not on the major league team; the Mariners seem to have the same aptitude for failing to develop hitting talent that the Orioles have long had for pitching talent.

Dear god it's true.

And, in an irony Zeth can appreciate, they traded the ONE legitimate homegrown hitting talent that they had developed in years (Adam Jones) to the Orioles for the one legitimate homegrown pitching talent that THEY had developed in years (Erik Bedard).

Is it possible they're doing a very poor job of identifying which offensive talents play best and worst in their particular park?

You have to think they would know how to figure this out, since WE can figure it out, but then again: this is the team that gave Adrian Beltre a mega-contract to play in a home park that might as well been designed by General Zod out of kryptonite to specifically suppress Beltre's power.

Thankfully AB was just so damn good that he still earned the value on that contract, and has gone on to prove his worth with other teams since. But ugh. I got so sick of having to defend Beltre to people who joked about how his Dodger homers in 2004 either had to have clearly been "steroids!" or an embarrassing Gary Matthews, Jr.-esque fluke that bilked the M's out of a ton of cash. My two-pronged defense was: 1.) No, Beltre's still a fine hitter, it's just that Safeco viciously suppresses his numbers unlike any other park in the league; 2.) He's still worth it because of his glove, his awesome habit of appealing his own check swings to the 1B ump, and his reaction to being touched on the head.

Come one, their talent isn't that bad; the stadium is making the same distortions on batters and hitters that Coors did in its hey-day (just in the opposite direction). Someone said something about this year cold and wet conditions (is that the cause)?

You know what King Felix has as a road ERA this year? 3.79 (which is not so kingly and may not even be princely). It is his home 2.21 that masks his current level of success.

Justin Smoak looks historically bad because of his home performance; on the road for a full season, he is a 30 HR kind of low average guy.

Come one, their talent isn't that bad; the stadium is making the same distortions on batters and hitters that Coors did in its hey-day (just in the opposite direction). Someone said something about this year cold and wet conditions (is that the cause)?

Hmmm. Maybe it has something to do with the park and the weather? The conspiracy theorist in me thinks maybe MLB dampened the bounce on the balls a couple of years ago to get past the steroid "scandals" and maybe this is affecting large parks on the coast more than others? It would explain Oakland becoming a graveyard for hitters, also. Then again, the Giants have had some good offensive performances. So, hell, I don't know.

Dave Cameron wrote about this subject on fangraphs a couple of weeks ago. He said that temperature has been a contributing factor this year because Seattle has been WAY below seasonal temp averages all year, and the colder temps are killing the offense despite wetter air. Essentially, the M's have had a small handful of home games with favorable weather conditions for hitters.

I really hope Jack Z is just blustering here. I listen to a pretty good amount of Seattle Sports talk on my daily commute, and the fans (however representative this chunk that calls sports radio is) are ready to pack Ichiro's bags themselves.

I'm sure there is a certain group of fans that won't come out to the ballpark if there hero is no longer there, but there is a much larger set of fans that are sick and tired of #### teams, and realize that Ichiro, at this point, is a huge reason why their team is ####. They have around an 80 million dollar payroll, and 17 of those million are going to a replacement level RF, that's not good.

Yes. He's also still the lynchpin of the M's marketing. If you hear a radio or TV ad for an upcoming game, it's still likely to be something like, "Come see Ichiro, Felix, and the rest of the Mariners take on the Yankees at Safeco Field July 23-25."

Most teams wouldn't at this point. But Ichiro is a Japanese living legend, and the Mariners are owned by Nintendo and thus have close ties to Japan, which I suspect is the main reason why they will.

The only time we know that Hiroshi Yamauchimi has stepped in to influence a personnel decision since he bought the team was to tell the Mariners to sign Ichiro at all costs when he came over in 2000. It's not impossible to think Yamauchimi still has that sort of regard for Ichiro and has issued a similar edict. Yamauchimi is not that much of a baseball fan; he does know how famous Ichiro is in Japan (a few years ago a poll reported that he was the second most recognizable person in Japan, second only to the emperor, and he's not going to sign Akihito.)

Is Jack Zduriencik still a genius?

See above. If he's making this statement on orders from above, there's nothing he can do about it.

Some of the fans in Seattle are attached to Ichiro just because he's famous, but really people just want good players to root for. None of the promising position players in Seattle ever seem to turn out. Smoak's been disappointing, Ackley and Montero haven't really done much, and while Wells/Carp/Gutierrez could be good, they all get hurt and haven't really played to their potential. It's even more frustrating when players leave Seattle to become bigger stars elsewhere - Beltre, Jones and Morse all left Seattle and found great success. It just feels like the team is cursed or something.

Salk asked Buhner what his reaction would be if Ichiro was brought back for three years, $35 million or $40 million -- which works out to just over half the yearly salary he's now earning.

"I'd vomit,'' Buhner said. "I mean, really, no offense. No offense, we've got to get this organization turned around. You can't be spending all the money on one guy.''

Buhner went on to say that he doesn't necessarily blame Ichiro for all the team's problems. He said he'd understand if the Mariners wanted to bring him back "as part of the equation" and have a fit on a rebuilding squad.

"But at the same time, they need help desperately,'' Buhner said. "They need some veteran leadership in the clubhouse. Wedgie (manager Eric Wedge) can't keep growing the beard, growing the mustache, shaving it off, that's not the answer.''

Buhner went on to say he's a big Wedge fan, but that "quite frankly, he's exposed" and needs help from within the organization.

Still, when I look at how this season is unfolding, it bothers me that the mere mention of Ichiro these days is greeted by negativity all around. Yesterday's mention that he could possibly return to the Mariners in 2013 set off a Twitter firestorm within minutes. And it got me thinking that there is one more thing I'd like to write about Ichiro before giving the topic a rest for the remainder of the season.

And that is, to remind everyone: we are very likely witnessing the final months of Ichiro's storied career.

The park is certainly a pitcher's park, but this year's splits are probably exaggerated due to small sample size. I think the more likely scenario is that the hitters still suck and that there will be some regression to the mean for both the home and road numbers in the second half.

I assume with this kind of organizational support Ichiro still has a pretty good shot at 3,000 hits. But he's going to have to at least keep hitting .250 as a regular for another three years. May be a tall order.